Heâs a really nice guy,â he adds, astonished that someone who has reached these dizzying heights is capable of exchanging a few civil words in a pub. But thatâs about it as far as staff interaction goes. There are too many other people to talk to.
Even though we get a lot of people into the shop, only a small percentage of them buy anything. The best customers are the ones who just have to buy a record on a Saturday, even if thereâs nothing they really want; unless they go home clutching a flat, square carrier bag, they feel uncomfortable. You can spot the vinyl addicts because after a while they get fed up with the rack they are flicking through, march over to a completely different section of the shop, pull a sleeve out from the middle somewhere, and come over to the counter; this is because they have been making a list of possible purchases in their head (âIf I donât find anything in the next five minutes, that blues compilation I saw half an hour ago will have to doâ), and suddenly sicken themselves with the amount of time they have wasted looking for something they donât really want. I know that feeling well (these are my people, and I understand them better than I understand anybody in the world): it is a prickly, clammy, panicky sensation, and you go out of the shop reeling. You walk much more quickly afterward, trying to recapture the part of the day that has escaped, and quite often you have the urge to read the international section of a newspaper, or go to see a Peter Greenaway film, to consume something solid and meaty which will lie on top of the cotton-candy worthlessness clogging up your head.
The other people I like are the ones who are being driven to find a tune that has been troubling them, distracting them, a tune that they can hear in their breath when they run for a bus, or in the rhythm of their windshield wipers when theyâre driving home from work. Sometimes something banal and obvious is responsible for the distraction: they have heard it on the radio, or at a club. But sometimes it has come to them as if by magic. Sometimes it has come to them because the sun was out, and they saw someone who looked nice, and they suddenly found themselves humming a snatch of a song they havenât heard for fifteen or twenty years; once, a guy came in because he had dreamed a record, the whole thing, melody, title, and artist. And when I found it for him (it was an old reggae thing, âHappy Go Lucky Girlâ by the Paragons), and it was more or less exactly as it had appeared to him in his sleep, the look on his face made me feel as though I was not a man who ran a record shop, but a midwife, or a painter, someone whose life is routinely transcendental.
You can really see what Dick and Barry are for on Saturdays. Dick is as patient and as enthusiastic and as gentle as a primary-school teacher: he sells people records they didnât know they wanted because he knows intuitively what they should buy. He chats, then puts something on the record deck, and soon theyâre handing over fivers almost distractedly as if thatâs what theyâd come in for in the first place. Barry, meanwhile, simply bulldozes customers into submission. He rubbishes them because they donât own the first Jesus and Mary Chain album, and they buy it, and he laughs at them because they donât own Blonde on Blonde, so they buy that, and he explodes in disbelief when they tell him that they have never heard of Ann Peebles, and then they buy something of hers, too. At around four oâclock most Saturday afternoons, just when I make us all a cup of tea, I have a little glow on, maybe because this is after all my work, and itâs going OK, maybe because Iâm proud of us, of the way that, though our talents are small and peculiar, we use them to their best advantage.
So when I come to close the shop, and weâre getting ready to go out for a drink as we do every
Even though we get a lot of people into the shop, only a small percentage of them buy anything. The best customers are the ones who just have to buy a record on a Saturday, even if thereâs nothing they really want; unless they go home clutching a flat, square carrier bag, they feel uncomfortable. You can spot the vinyl addicts because after a while they get fed up with the rack they are flicking through, march over to a completely different section of the shop, pull a sleeve out from the middle somewhere, and come over to the counter; this is because they have been making a list of possible purchases in their head (âIf I donât find anything in the next five minutes, that blues compilation I saw half an hour ago will have to doâ), and suddenly sicken themselves with the amount of time they have wasted looking for something they donât really want. I know that feeling well (these are my people, and I understand them better than I understand anybody in the world): it is a prickly, clammy, panicky sensation, and you go out of the shop reeling. You walk much more quickly afterward, trying to recapture the part of the day that has escaped, and quite often you have the urge to read the international section of a newspaper, or go to see a Peter Greenaway film, to consume something solid and meaty which will lie on top of the cotton-candy worthlessness clogging up your head.
The other people I like are the ones who are being driven to find a tune that has been troubling them, distracting them, a tune that they can hear in their breath when they run for a bus, or in the rhythm of their windshield wipers when theyâre driving home from work. Sometimes something banal and obvious is responsible for the distraction: they have heard it on the radio, or at a club. But sometimes it has come to them as if by magic. Sometimes it has come to them because the sun was out, and they saw someone who looked nice, and they suddenly found themselves humming a snatch of a song they havenât heard for fifteen or twenty years; once, a guy came in because he had dreamed a record, the whole thing, melody, title, and artist. And when I found it for him (it was an old reggae thing, âHappy Go Lucky Girlâ by the Paragons), and it was more or less exactly as it had appeared to him in his sleep, the look on his face made me feel as though I was not a man who ran a record shop, but a midwife, or a painter, someone whose life is routinely transcendental.
You can really see what Dick and Barry are for on Saturdays. Dick is as patient and as enthusiastic and as gentle as a primary-school teacher: he sells people records they didnât know they wanted because he knows intuitively what they should buy. He chats, then puts something on the record deck, and soon theyâre handing over fivers almost distractedly as if thatâs what theyâd come in for in the first place. Barry, meanwhile, simply bulldozes customers into submission. He rubbishes them because they donât own the first Jesus and Mary Chain album, and they buy it, and he laughs at them because they donât own Blonde on Blonde, so they buy that, and he explodes in disbelief when they tell him that they have never heard of Ann Peebles, and then they buy something of hers, too. At around four oâclock most Saturday afternoons, just when I make us all a cup of tea, I have a little glow on, maybe because this is after all my work, and itâs going OK, maybe because Iâm proud of us, of the way that, though our talents are small and peculiar, we use them to their best advantage.
So when I come to close the shop, and weâre getting ready to go out for a drink as we do every
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